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September 5, 2009
There are two basic traditions in modern philosophy about the subject: one in which human subjectivity is imagined as essentially disembodied (mind, soul, consciousness) as in Descates the other in which self, agency, memory and intersubjectivity are embodied as in Merleau Ponty. Merleau-Ponty rejects the Cartesian model of the self as a centred and autonomous consciousness (for which the body serves as a container or instrument). The mind is anchored in the body--hence the idea of the lived body.
Merleau-Ponty framed his philosophy as a reactions against the intellectual heritage of classical modern science and philosophy, Galilean-Cartesian physics, and Cartesian mind-body dualisms. This heritage, passing through Newton and Laplace, Comte and 19th-century positivism generally, had a reach long and powerful enough to be a hegemonic in the 20th-century. Merleau-Ponty rejected the "simple location" of allegedly discrete quanta of matter existing only in external relations with each other in favor of overlapping, encroaching, non-serial relations between instances of process. He held that nature is not a machine and that there is internal activity in nature.
Vision, finally, is relational for Merleau-Ponty because it reveals the intertwining of perceiver and perceived: on the one hand, the act of seeing seems to take us outside our bodies into the world; yet on the other hand, what we see is inside us, somewhere ‘behind’ our eyes. ‘My vision is at the thing itself ’, but it is also ‘my own or “in me”’.
In his last unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau Ponty gives us a phenomenological account of embodied sight and a carnal presence (flesh) insinuates itself into the relations between bodies, between things and thoughts, self and world. Sight lends the flesh an intersubjective dimension; it literally carries carnality outside the viewer’s corporeal envelope and into the world. The fundamental il y a, the "there is," for Merleau-Ponty, is flesh: that of my body and that of the world.
Every interaction between myself and my environment, every idea, sensation, movement or act of communication is a ‘carnal relation’ Flesh is not a fact or collection of facts, a mental representation, or the locus of an intersection of body and mind. It is, rather, "the formative medium of the object and the subject" .
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